I finally “get it". I
finally understand the theory of Social Justice.
In Florida a recently passed constitutional amendment would
restore voting rights to convicted felons who have completed their
sentences. Now a political groups claims
that convicted felons in Florida who would otherwise be eligible to vote under recently
passed Amendment 4 are unable to do so because they are unable to afford to pay
the fine and costs or restitution which was imposed as part of their felony
sentence. They can’t vote because they can’t pay and that’s unfair. That violates the equal protection clause
under the U.S. constitution. Felons should not be responsible for the financial
consequences of their crimes to the victims of those crimes.
Meanwhile, those same champions of voting rights for felons
also believe that the people of this country should make some compensatory
payments – reparations - to the descendants of African slaves. They hold that we as Americans are
corporately responsible for a crime committed over 150 years ago. Therefore I,
a non-slave owner and the child of non-slave owners who were themselves
children of non-slave owners, should be financially responsible for this
historic social wrong.
These two examples cleared the definition of Social Justice
up for me. At its core Social Justice consists
of developing a political agenda to reach preordained goals that requires its
adherents to hold diametrically opposed opinions concurrently by force of will
alone, without the benefit of logic or reason. Its practice requires the claiming
or declaiming of responsibility and assigning the same in absolutely paradoxical
ways in respect to others. It means living in the land of subtle hues and
shadows where the strong sunlight of careful reasoning, interpolation and
logical progression never illuminate the darkness. It means holding core beliefs that are as
flexible and elastic as rubber bands.
Ultimately Social Justice is about the subsuming of
individual rights and responsibilities under the greater good as decided by the
political beliefs of those in charge. It
is about shaming vast segments of society with kind of faux guilt for situations
and events far outside their ability to control or affect meanwhile absolving
individuals of crimes and the responsibility to pay for them for political
purposes.
Writ large this philosophy creates a society where
situational ethics guided by political goals become the deciding factor in
every situation. It vacuums away individual responsibility for volitional actions.
It is the mortal end of RIGHT and WRONG.
We have seen this exact type of social engineering before in
the histories of war-time Germany and Japan and the Stalinism of the Soviet
Union. Individual justice is swept away by the broom of authoritarianism labeled
as what is “best for society as a whole”. Results in those countries were
seemingly less than satisfactory.
